2013 Dir: JC Chandor 106 mins
This is a contentious review because many sailors just hate this film. It has a cast, of one – Robert Redford, who has about one main word of dialogue – the F word, but we have to wait one hour twelve minutes before he manages to explete it.
Well, that’s slightly unfair – the film opens with a narrated letter, from Our Man, RR the solo sailor, who is presumably writing to his family saying sorry for losing his boat and, at that stage, we presume, also his life, and we also hear him make an SOS call.
The plot is contemporary. Retired man still has things to prove and is therefore sailing alone across the Indian Ocean. Redford was 75 when he made the film and he makes a very good fist of the fit loner. And this is noteworthy because apparently he had never sailed before.
There are some big mistakes. He wakes up to find water in the cabin and that his yacht (a Cal 39 – three were used to make the film) has T-boned a container on her starboard quarter. She has all her sails up and there is wind so this is the first unlikely thing to occur. He can’t get rid of the container until he ties his sea anchor to it. He does not stuff anything into this gaping hole or rig a sail to cover it, though he does sail on starboard tack while effecting a repair with battens, glass mat and epoxy.
Despite having no effective electric power he is up the mast at one point trying to fix his VHF aerial as a storm comes up. That might explain why he is then on the foredeck in the height of the storm trying to hoist his storm jib… He goes overboard on his leash.
He also takes out his lee boards whenever he gets on deck in these appalling conditions… and is not wearing a harness when his boat gets rolled a second time. That breaks the mast and he is probably the first sailor in history to be able to jettison the wreckage of the mast next to his hull by merely cutting a line (we all know he’d need bolt croppers or other tools). Worst of all there’s no EPIRB… and the film’s too new to blame it on just being an old 121.5 MHz model (phased out in 2009)… though it might have been apt to the plot for the anoraks.
But the rolling sequences are very realistic (CGI being eschewed in favour of realism) and Redford does most of his own swimming underwater scenes. He deploys his liferaft correctly and (more lor less) steps up into it as his boat is about to sink after which the film is all about survival on a liferaft (and learning how to use a sextant with the Mary Blewitt text book). We can see from his charts he’s a long way from anywhere though initially he does not plot a course to safety.
But look. We’re being harsh. This ain’t the manual. It’s a film that actually is all about error and how compounding errors can prove fatal.
And we need to suspend some of our disbelief because the acting is all about stoicism in the face of one after another appalling disaster that the sea can throw at you. It’s well photographed, it feels real and Redford is, of course brilliant… despite having no lines (other than those he hauls or cuts). DH